第16章

"You have a strong will," said Bernard. "I see that."

"No. I have simply a weak mother. But I make sacrifices too, sometimes."

"What do you call sacrifices?"

"Well, spending the winter at Sorrento."

Bernard began to laugh, and then he told her she must have had a very happy life--"to call a winter at Sorrento a sacrifice."

"It depends upon what one gives up," said Miss Vivian.

"What did you give up?"

She touched him with her mocking smile again.

"That is not a very civil question, asked in that way."

"You mean that I seem to doubt your abnegation?"

"You seem to insinuate that I had nothing to renounce. I gave up--I gave up--" and she looked about her, considering a little--"I gave up society."

"I am glad you remember what it was," said Bernard.

"If I have seemed uncivil, let me make it up. When a woman speaks of giving up society, what she means is giving up admiration.

You can never have given up that--you can never have escaped from it.

You must have found it even at Sorrento."

"It may have been there, but I never found it. It was very respectful--it never expressed itself."

"That is the deepest kind," said Bernard.

"I prefer the shallower varieties," the young girl answered.

"Well," said Bernard, "you must remember that although shallow admiration expresses itself, all the admiration that expresses itself is not shallow."

Miss Vivian hesitated a moment.

"Some of it is impertinent," she said, looking straight at him, rather gravely.

Bernard hesitated about as long.

"When it is impertinent it is shallow. That comes to the same thing."

The young girl frowned a little.

"I am not sure that I understand--I am rather stupid.

But you see how right I am in my taste for such places as this.

I have to come here to hear such ingenious remarks."

"You should add that my coming, as well, has something to do with it."

"Everything!" said Miss Vivian.

"Everything? Does no one else make ingenious remarks?

Does n't my friend Wright?"

"Mr. Wright says excellent things, but I should not exactly call them ingenious remarks."

"It is not what Wright says; it 's what he does. That 's the charm!" said Bernard.

His companion was silent for a moment. "That 's not usually a charm; good conduct is not thought pleasing."

"It surely is not thought the reverse!" Bernard exclaimed.

"It does n't rank--in the opinion of most people--among the things that make men agreeable."

"It depends upon what you call agreeable."

"Exactly so," said Miss Vivian. "It all depends on that."

"But the agreeable," Bernard went on--"it is n't after all, fortunately, such a subtle idea! The world certainly is agreed to think that virtue is a beautiful thing."

Miss Vivian dropped her eyes a moment, and then, looking up, "Is it a charm?" she asked.

"For me there is no charm without it," Bernard declared.

"I am afraid that for me there is," said the young girl.

Bernard was puzzled--he who was not often puzzled.

His companion struck him as altogether too clever to be likely to indulge in a silly affectation of cynicism.

And yet, without this, how could one account for her sneering at virtue?

"You talk as if you had sounded the depths of vice!" he said, laughing.

"What do you know about other than virtuous charms?"

"I know, of course, nothing about vice; but I have known virtue when it was very tiresome."

"Ah, then it was a poor affair. It was poor virtue.

The best virtue is never tiresome."

Miss Vivian looked at him a little, with her fine discriminating eye.

"What a dreadful thing to have to think any virtue poor!"

This was a touching reflection, and it might have gone further had not the conversation been interrupted by Mrs. Vivian's appealing to her daughter to aid a defective recollection of a story about a Spanish family they had met at Biarritz, with which she had undertaken to entertain Gordon Wright.

After this, the little circle was joined by a party of American friends who were spending a week at Baden, and the conversation became general.